Cadence
What cycling taught me about building a startup
I fell off my little bike. Luckily it’s just a scrape, and I didn’t break anything. I flew over the handlebars and landed on my face — I’ve still got the scars to this day, and I’m definitely careful about how I brake now…
In cycling, cadence1 is how you sustain effort without blowing up — high cadence, lower resistance, longer output. Spinning fast in an easier gear shifts the workload from your muscles to your cardiovascular system. Your lungs and heart recover quickly; your leg muscles don’t. So high cadence lets you sustain effort much longer without your legs “blowing up”.
When a climb gets hard, shift to an easier gear and spin faster rather than muscling through in a hard gear. As a beginner, I do this. You see the wall, you tense up, you stomp. Difficulty feels like it demands more of the same thing, just with more effort behind it. It’s the wrong move. The pain in your quads isn’t a challenge to overcome — it’s diagnostic information. It’s your body telling you you’re in the wrong gear. Shift down, spin faster, let your lungs take the load instead of your legs, and more importantly, you’ll still have legs at the top of the climb.
In startups, most founders grind big gears. Long days. Weekends “just to ship this one feature”. Launch dates the team reaches on fumes. One more push before the raise. These are all high-force, low-cadence efforts — maximum load on the muscles, minimum room for the system to recover. It isn’t metaphorical, it’s literal. When your legs blow up on a climb, it’s because lactate accumulated faster than your body could clear it. When a founder blows up, it’s because sleep debt, context-switching, and cortisol accumulated faster than the body could clear them. Same mechanism, different tissue.
Sustainable output comes from rhythm, not intensity.
Your threshold power in cycling is roughly the wattage you can hold for an hour before you crack. Above it, you’re borrowing. Below it, you can sustain. Founders have an FTP too — the hours of genuinely deep work you can hold not for a week, but for a month. For most people that’s four or five a day, not ten. The trick isn’t finding your peak day. It’s finding your sustainable ceiling and living slightly under it.
Every serious training plan has recovery weeks — every third or fourth week, load drops to 40–60%. Not because you’re weak, but because adaptation happens during recovery, not during training. The stimulus breaks you down; the rest builds you back up, slightly stronger. Founders who never take a recovery week aren’t more committed — they’re just slowly regressing while believing they’re progressing.
A cycling season isn’t one mode repeated — it’s blocks. Base, build, peak, recovery. Startup work has the same structure whether you name it or not: shipping weeks, deep research weeks, sales weeks, recovery weeks. Founders try to do all four every single day and wonder why none of them go well.
Cadence isn’t a “work less“ argument. It’s a gear argument. The fastest founder over a five-year window isn’t the one who burned month one at fourteen hours a day — it’s the one still shipping in month forty-eight.
I already know what asphalt tastes like. Once was enough.
Cadence is how fast you're spinning the pedals, measured in RPM (revolutions per minute).